The Effect of Democracy on Corruption: Income is Key

This paper provides an explanation for the ambiguous relationship between democracy and corruption. Using rich panel data with annual observations from 1998 to 2012 allows us to control not only for country- and time-invariant factors but also for potentialreverse causality between corruption and in...

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Autores:
Jetter, Michael
Montoya Agudelo,Alejandra
Ramírez Hassan Andrés
Tipo de recurso:
Fecha de publicación:
2015
Institución:
Universidad EAFIT
Repositorio:
Repositorio EAFIT
Idioma:
eng
OAI Identifier:
oai:repository.eafit.edu.co:10784/7512
Acceso en línea:
http://hdl.handle.net/10784/7512
Palabra clave:
corruption
democracy
income levels
panel data
regime type
Rights
License
restrictedAccess
Description
Summary:This paper provides an explanation for the ambiguous relationship between democracy and corruption. Using rich panel data with annual observations from 1998 to 2012 allows us to control not only for country- and time-invariant factors but also for potentialreverse causality between corruption and income levels in a 3SLS framework. Democracy reduces corruption but only in economies that have already crossed a GDP/capita level of approximately US$2,000 (in 2005 US$). For poorer nations, democratization is suggested to increase corruption. Other institutional characteristics are unlikely to drive this result and findings are robust to a variety of robustness checks and quantile regressions.